“Back home again!” Jack repeated, joyously; and then shook his head at himself in solemn warning.

“And those of us that don’t take our meat without salt sort of needed cheering up,” Jim went on.  “Only a few days after I wrote you, the Doge and Mary suddenly started for New York.  Maybe he has looked you up.” (The “maybe” followed an “of course,” which had been scratched through.) “And maybe if he has you know more about what is going on here than we do.  We practically don’t know anything; but I’ve sure got a feeling of that uncertainty in the atmosphere that I used to have before a cyclone when I lived in Kansas.  This Prather, that so many thought at first looked like you, has also gone to New York.

“He left only two days ago.  Maybe you will run across him.  I don’t know, but it seems to me he’s gone to get the powder for some kind of a blow-up here.  Jack, you know what would happen if we lost our water rights and you know what I wrote you in my last letter.  Leddy and Ropey Smith are hanging around all the time, and since the Doge went a whole lot of fellows that don’t belong to the honey-bee class have been turning up and putting up their tents out on the outskirts, like they expected something to happen.  If things get worse and I’ve got something to go on and we need you, I’m going to telegraph just as I said I would; because, Jack, though you’re worth a lot of millions, someway we feel you’re one of us.

“Very truly yours for Little Rivers,

“JAMES R. GALWAY.

“P.S.—­Belvy said to put in P.S. because P.S.’s are always the most important part of a letter.  She wants to know if you won’t write another story.”

“I will!” said Jack.  “I will, immediately!”

He made it a long story.  He took a deal of pains with it in the very relief of something to do when sleep was impossible and he must count the moments in wretched impatience until his interview with the one person who could answer his questions.

As he went down town in the morning the very freshness of the air inspired him with the hope that he should come out of his father’s office with every phantom reduced to a figment of imagination springing from the abnormality of his life-story; with a message that should allay Mary’s fears and soften her harshness toward him; with the certainty that the next time he and his father sat together at dinner it would be in a permanent understanding, craved of affection.  Mary might come to New York; the Doge might spend his declining years in leisurely patronage of bookshops and galleries; and he would learn how to run the business, though his head split, as became a simple, normal son.

These eddying thoughts on the surface of his mind, however, could not free him of a consciousness of a deep, unsounded current that seemed to be the irresistible, moving power of Mary’s future, the store’s, his fathers, Jasper Ewold’s and his own.  With it he was going into a gorge, over a cataract, or out into pleasant valleys, he knew not which.  He knew nothing except that there was no stopping the flood of the current which had its source in streams already flowing before he was born.  When the last question had been asked his future would be clear.  Relief was ahead, and after relief would come the end of introspection and the beginning of his real career.